2019: Year to Realize - Oust Trump and See Through Crucial Delusions

posted by Michael Mielke | 25sc
December 31, 2018

Christmas Week, 2018

Introduction

2019 – if we are to have any viable future – must be the year where three things are “Realized,” in both senses of the word, i.e., (1) to cause these necessities to happen, and (2) to understand them clearly, to become aware of them as necessary facts.

The first necessity is to oust Donald Trump.The second is to understand, feel, and see how life is being smothered and strangled in the pandemic overshoot that is continuing unabated.An excellent view into humanity’s chokehold that piles on more and more overshoot in the 21st century bottleneck we live within, is a clear view of our plastic pandemonium.

The third necessity is to see and feel the childish delusion that allows us to continue the accelerating barbecue of fossil fuels—and we burnt some 2.7% more CO2 in 2018 than in 2017, and about 2% more in 2017 than in 2016, and the “more” continues back almost every single year since the first UN IPCC warning in 1990.The fossil fuel necessity for 2019 is to actually perceive how we are deluding ourselves, thus refusing to change course and cut back dramatically on these poisons and pollutions.

Realizations for 2019

If at the end of 2018, you feel just fine, or you believe you have had a “pretty good year,” then please read no further. Actually, 2018 must be reviewed through a lens that includes more than just individual and personal plenty. 2018 was dreadful, and spectacularly so. Particularly in the USA. The Trumpster continued to destroy our government and even governance itself, showing how his insistent destructiveness is inescapable; for him at least.

Trump has been a charlatan for decades; he is an inveterate con-man and crook. The most important and necessary first goal for 2019 is to oust Trump. That should be doable; Trump has provided the evidence for his ouster, and now it is visible for the vast majority of Americans. Investigative hearings in Congress will begin early January. Seventeen separate investigations into his various misdeeds and criminal enterprises were on-going at the end of 2018. So, Trump is his best self-destructor. Similar to Nixon’s ouster, the American public will rid themselves of Trump when their noses are rubbed enough in it. When the public turned on Nixon for less criminality than Trump has thus far demonstrated, he was soon out.

Ousting Trump is the first necessity that must be “Realized” for 2019, but not the most decisive. Survival is being discussed here. Two additional necessities for 2019 must be added and attained. One, is confronting the Plastic Plague. It must be stopped, then cleaned up. See the story line here, “Cleaning Up the Plastic in the Ocean” — while some birds still fly and some fish still swim.

60 Minutes, “Cleaning Up the Plastic in the Ocean,” December 16, 2018

See the lead image, right.

Put simply, progress toward stopping plastic must be seen in 2019. Besides ending Dumpster Trumpster, humanity in 2019 must see that we cannot continue to exist and live in a world producing hundreds of billions of pounds of plastic each year.

To survive, humans must cut plastic production by billions of pounds this next year.

Third and finally, it is crucial that reason, rationality, and urgency enter into the climate emergency. It’s not the deniers that the climate crusaders need to most worry about. It’s the crusaders’ own team, the group who believe in non-reality-based fantasies. The most crucial question of 2019 does not involve Trump or plastic pandemonium. Trump will do himself in. That plastic is now part of every water and air creature can be understood and acted on, if the third and most important necessity for 2019 can be grasped.

If We Continue to Believe that Herds of Carbon-Sucking Unicorns Will Save Us, We Will Not Survive

Almost all news circulated about climate stabilization states that we have about 12 years to reduce half of our carbon pollution if we want the have a good chance of stabilizing the climate. That’s only true if herds of Carbon-Sucking Unicorns suddenly appear among us – also known as Negative Emissions Technologies. In particular, the world is betting heavily on an unproven technology known as Bio-Energy Carbon Capture and Storage.

The IPCC, the United Nations, planners, philanthropists, journalists, and almost all green groups accept this dead-wrong technos and its timeline, but to add insult to injury they also have the amount that we must cut carbon fuels wrong. Despite the “good guys” missing the main points, it’s not difficult to understand why this nation’s climate warriors are accepting hell and high water: It’s because we all are counting on fusion energy to save the day!

Well, not exactly.

But, this is just as delusional. Actually, almost all of our options we are counting on to save ourselves rely on taking the CO2 out of the air long after we put it there, and continuing to suck carbon into the 22nd century and beyond. Really, truly insane. It means we can keep our carbon intense lifestyles going while we defer consequent reductions until we have invented and developed the carbon-sucking technologies that we don’t yet have, and that we cannot get at the scale we need. In fact, all 0f us who believe that we have 12 years to reduce our carbon fuels about 50% (that delusion is pandemic in Greenies and Green journalists, even the best) are living the delusion.

If that delusion is not scrapped then we will neither stop nor get off our current runaway Extinction Train. This delusion is called the Tinkerbell-Effect — for the reason that we are expecting Tinkerbell to come back from the dead and carry us all back home aboard the Jolly Roger!

Once you understand this foolishness, then you can explain to your family and your friends how we are so married to our self-destruction that we will sacrifice our children and their children because of a childish fantasy. Now, if you don’t understand this yet, hold on, because it’s not too complicated for a middle-school educated person. Plus, you get to explain how the childish Tinkerbell-Effect will end civilization and all Posterity to boot!No, this is not a joke, rather, the miracle we are counting on to fix the situation after we have pushed Humpty-Dumpty off the wall. So, we are planning to put our shattered climate back-together after breaking it.

Just read this chapter, “The Tinkerbell-Effect and Breaking the Climate,” pages 11-18 in our ebook, Delusions and Contradictions. Or, if you prefer, you can watch any number of climate scientist Kevin Anderson’s lectures, such as: one (from mid-December), two (here Kevin explains how we are betting we can cure our lung cancer with a miracle cure after it has metastasized[1]), or three (early 2017, and more complete).

Now, after reviewing enough of these, if you still don’t believe that we are deluded, then go back to your life and its lifestyle because you just don’t want to see Reality or understand the crises we find ourselves in. Understand that not everyone can be cured of childish miracle wishes. None of us wants to die either. But, if you can become a thinking adult and help in this adult situation where we have been diagnosed with early-stage cancer, and we do have treatment options, then finish this essay and become part of effective response alternatives.

Of course, all 0f us know how difficult it is for Americans to take leave of Fantasyland, since it is so embedded into our cultural DNA, but all of humanity and most of the rest of life is at stake, so perhaps (when we know how bad things really are) some can see simply, “WHAT IS.” They might have to do a little less social media consumption, or become a little less “screen zombies,” but that is the big price we have to pay to connect to REAL LIFE, as opposed to virtual life-like two-dimensional illusions.

If you have made it this far, and really care about our children and grandchildren (even if they are comprehensive screen zombies), then let’s review and let’s explain what there is to do before we all take the Titanic to the bottom.

Three Necessities for 2019

Actually, not virtually, there are three necessities for 2019 if we are to have some chance to salvage something another few decades hence. The first, and perhaps most likely is to oust Trump. With Trump as the incumbent into 2020, then it would be time to move with the Titanic Dance Band and drink cognac until it’s all over, because a course change will not happen until and unless there is less madness in DC. Without ousting there is no way enough can see beyond the complete distraction and insanity of Trumpville.

Next, it’s necessary to see, to perceive what we are doing by strangling our life-support systems, and plastic is as good and gruesome a way as any other. And it’s visual! You can watch a good TV program and you don’t have to leave the screen. But you might have to grapple with your revulsion for a while. And if you believe it is impossible to do anything about “plastic world and plastic oceans,” then what does that say about you?

To engender an effective response to plasticville, it might be necessary to see how it is part of the collective inability to comprehend our delusion systems. We seem to believe we can continue unmolested any number of impossible trends and pathways that will bring unprecedented disasters and catastrophes upon billions of us. Actually, we will need to cut back production 100s of billions of pounds of plastic by the end of 2019. And that is just a small part of plastic production!

The third necessity for 2019 is comprised of a pervasive and fatal delusion that must be seen, felt, understood, and eradicated. This delusion is the Tinkerbell-Effect. This is the childish fantasy that we can move gradually to cut our fossil fuels and still have an un-shattered climate. It’s betting our future on miracles. It’s assuming that just because we want to continue the fossil fuel barbeque, just a little less, that some unknown, undeveloped, undemonstrated, un-scalable, wished-for technology will appear and multiply — like the proverbial loaves and fishes — when we need it. And at scales of deployment that are insanely unrealistic. So, this is not just a delusion, it is the KEY delusion, the one that must be understood and then put out of its delusory misery. This new year.

To understand the Tinkerbell-Effect is to begin to have possibilities for dealing with the other delusions that comprise so many of the over-determined crises we now face, and that must be dealt with immediately. If you do not understand the Tinkerbell-Effect well enough to explain it to your friends and family, then read it here, pages 11-18. To grasp the Tinkerbell-Effect and what it means is to have a chance to begin to be able to get off the runaway Extinction Train, and move toward recovery.

Because as everyone knows, treatments cannot begin without accurate diagnoses.

Here is how it proceeds…………………

Getting Off the Extinction Train

Once you can see how delusions underlie our cultural operating systems, i.e., the economic, social, political, and even the moral systems by which we operate, then you can tell your children, your parents, your family, and those you really care about. Get the ball rolling so that you can have the necessity conversation at your church, around the dinner table, and more. We won’t start treatment until we understand the diagnoses – why keep it to yourself and let the Extinction Train prevail?

It’s not complicated, and it might just be plain and simple. Unless your friends and family understand the basic necessities for 2019, they will still ride the runaway Extinction Train to their doom. Once they do understand, tell them not to keep it to themselves, so that more people can get off the Train. That is, unless folks “get” the meaning, momentum, and measure of the Tinkerbell-Effect and its cultural narcotic, they won’t even understand their victimhood, much less cut back on their drugs of choice!

But, if they do “get” it, then they can at least share the news, and share the horror! Because everyone you know, and everyone in rich countries on this Good Green Earth are bound into it! All of us, and all of our operating systems are caught clapping for Tinkerbell!

Perhaps you wanted a nice and an easy solution to this mess we have made, in the wealthy and privileged countries no less. Well, that’s not reality and it’s too late for more Deus-ex-machina fantasies. It’s hard work, caring about the future for our children and grandchildren while we add-on the hard work of recovery and survival. You can view the current abandonment of our future as temporary insanity. How else do we think we can keep going with 7,666,666,666 people when we collectively are taking almost twice what the Good Green Earth can give us each year? And we have been draining our mother dry for most of the last 50 years.

So, start a conversation in your home, with your family, at your church. Without the spread of that conversation “stat,” what chance is there? And if it’s not you, then who? And if not in 2019, then when?

This is simply our chance. The three necessities: seen, understood, and accomplished. So, share the news. It’s straightforward.

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Climate Emergency Coalition (CEC) is a lead organization creating the national conversation on the climate emergency to result in a declaration of Global Warming State of Emergency and an Emergency Climate Mobilization. CEC is working to alert, engage, and activate Americans to call for responses to meet the scope, scale, and urgency of the crisis: national climate policies and an emergency mobilization to phase out fossil fuels within a decade.